ASUS EAX X1950 PRO 256MB

Index

Buying
DirectX9 compliant hardware at the dawn of DirectX10, doesn't make much sense
at the first glance. But as new hardware appears, the older generations of
graphical cards rapidly become cheaper.

ATi X1950 pro chip

ATI's X1950pro is not a new card, but it still has attractive attributes. We were
interested whether or not will it be capable to run new games at decent frame
rates.

The card in all its glory

The
card

We received Asus card for testing. The card has
made a new cooler, different from a reference one. It is less restrictive for the airflow than
the referent ATi cooler, so the vent can run at lower speeds and at the same time it will make less
noise.

The card is powered with RV570 core with 12 pipelines and 36 pixel shaders. The second attribute
and ATI's main weapon against Nvidia's cards in the price range. The card features full
256-bit bus connects to 1400 MHz onboard memory, but when we overclocked both
memory and GPU, we learned that this speed is a limiting factor. The GPU has
got enough rendering power, so it can easily saturate the memory bandwidth. To
prove this we increased the speed of the GPU from default 580 to 640MHz,
leaving the memory speed at its default. The performance gain was minimal, just as we expected.

The card without cooler

The only
heat pipe in the cooler has the task to conduct heat from the GPU to the heatsink fins.
It works pretty good, the relatively low temperatures proves it. Under full
load, the GPU heated to 47 degrees Celsius, but you have to bare in mind that
the temperature will definitely be higher during the warm summer days.

On the right side you can see the bottom of the ASUS cooler. On the left side Arctic Cooling X2.

The cooler
is single slot. As you can see, you can easily use Thermalright's HR-05 SLI
chipset cooler, as there are no elements on the card that would collide with it.
The only concern we have is inadequate cooling of the power part of the card.
There are elements that are really hot, and have no cooling at all. We will inspect
this further in the overclocking section.

The biggest chip (voltage regulation) is not cooled at all, and it is the hottest one.

As in all
of the x1000 cards, both DVI ports are dual link. There is a S-VHS video out
for all of you that play on their TV. Well, nothing new here. This is good,
because this is all we need. Power is drown from a PCI-e outlet, which is
standard for this category of cards.

Three benchmarks

We tested
the card with Test Drive Unlimited, TES: Oblivion, and with 3Dmark 06. We showed no mercy, so in most of the games we turned the eye candy on, which
resulted with relative low frame rates. We tried to bring the card to its knees.
When we drove the races, we were racing like in Carmageddon – trying to punch
the opponents and frame rate to the ground.

Oblivion
was complicated to benchmark, but we managed to make two tests. The first one
was too much for the card, but the second one went easy on the card.

All the
tests were tested at default frequencies, and at overclocked ones (GPU 640 /
MEM 1600). In Oblivion we had two runs for every test, because of the loading
from hard drive to RAM.

Test
Drive Unlimited

As we see
in the table with scores, even at 1024x768 resolution, we cannot achieve high frame
rates. 62 FPS is max when there are no other cars on the screen. You can expect about 40
FPS max while driving through Honolulu.

The bad
thing is that in most resolutions you will have to set the detail level to
medium to get decent frame rates. Also forget about Antialiasing as it kills the
performance. Anisotropicfiltering can be used, as proven by the scores, but
values higher than 4X hurt the performance too much.

Test drive is playable at 1024x768. Higher resolutions are not recommended.

When we
overclocked the card to 640/1600, things wentmuch better. At high resolutions we can
now get playable frame rates, but the details still have to be set to medium.
Anisotropic filtering and even Antialiasing won't kill the performance if you
keep them at minimal values.

The game
has stressed the card a lot. If you have a 20" widescreen, playing in its
native resolution won't give you satisfaction, and in lower resolutions the
graphics don't look so good. So, if you are ready to compromise, then the card
has passed the test.

TES: Oblivion

Oblivion is
a very stressful test, and a crash test for the reviewer's nerves. We
were searching for what hurts the performance the most. We found out that you get the greatest
frame drops when you pick a fight in areas full of grass and trees. So no picniking please.

Picking a fight in Oblivion will stress the card a lot.

Here we started the descent

And here it ended

We did two tests. The
first one is a fight with a city guard near Cheydinhal. Frankly, we think that
the fighting scenes are the most important, because low fram erates during the
fight mean that you won't be able to react in time. Without overclocking, the
results are not what we would call playable. The situation changes when we rose
the frequencies of the card. Now we are getting somewhere. Even at high
resolutions the frame rate didn't drop below 22 frames.

The second
benchmark was a descent from the mountains that surround the city of Cheydinhal
to the city itself. As there is no vegetation in the mountains, that's why we
get the highest framerates here. The lower we go, the forest becomes denser, and the frame rate drops. All we said for Test drive applies here. If you
want to play at higher resolutions, the default card doesn't have enough power.
But when overclocked, the card gives us the possibility even to use anisotropic
filtering.

Overclocking & cooling

We were
talking so much about overclocking this card, now we will share with you our
experience. First of all, the cooler is really good. It is capable of radiating
the extra heat generated from overclocking, and in comparison with Artic
Cooling Accelero, it will perform similar. We are going to complain about
noise, because this card sounds really loud at 80% of its speed.

Tried to push the air cooling.

With the
default cooler it is easy to overclock the onboard memory from 1400 to 1600 MHz
without compromises. We were a bit disappointed with GPU overclocking
capabilities. Only 10%, which results in 640 MHz core. Inadequate cooling? No,
there is a new problem.

As we have
found out, our card overclocked the same using the default cooler, Accelero,
and water cooling. The problem isn't in the GPU, or onboard memory, but in the
onboard power supply elements (voltage regulators). As you may have heard, ATI
has gone completely digital in this segment, and these elements heat up really
fast. By adding heat sinks to these elements, we have achieved another 20 MHz
to the GPU overclock.

Unfortunately, no matter how big fan was over this part
of the graphical card, we couldn't attain higher clock frequencies. Maybe these
voltage regulators are working at their max already.

We have
added small coolers on these elements, as you can see on the picture, but it
still didn't help.

Final thoughts

To buy or
not to buy? The problem is that ATI has two more X1950 models, so the decision
is even harder. The great thing about this Asus card is that it is really cheap and it sells for only €150. That is a great price.

If you are
a gamer on the budget then you should consider X1950GT. Still, this card is only €30 cheaper but then again slower. X1950GT can
attain the clock speeds of the pro card, but it has slower onboard memory. This
slower memory makes the difference when you are playing in higher resolutions,
but again modern games are using more and more video memory, and here we come
to the second doubt.

Is 256MB enough? Frankly,
no. If you have tried custom made high resolution textures for Oblivion (e.g. Quarl's
texture packs), then you have seen that using big textures hits the performance dramatically. If you want to play in higher
resolutions we suggest buying a 512MB version of 1950 pro.

However, the
card is a good choice. It can handle most of the games even at higher
resolutions, but with some details reduced. The strong point of this card are
definitely pixel shaders. 36 of them, will allow you to play modern games that
require extra pixel shading power. As for DirectX 10 games, they will come late 2007 anyway so you still have some time to enjoy the DirectX 9 hardware.